A Maryland Lottery player from Hanover, who plays when the mood strikes her, took home a $100,000 scratch-off prize.
A Hanover woman tends to only play the Lottery when the mood strikes. The mood struck at just the right time recently when she decided to purchase a $50 $5,000,000 Fortune ticket that turned out to be a $100,000 winner.
“I’m very grateful!” she said May 27 after claiming her prize at Lottery headquarters.
Though she’s a casual player who doesn’t buy tickets regularly, she has a method, which she identified as “Trust the Intuition.” The phrase is also the name she picked to tell her winning tale.
Going back several months or more, she and her fiancé were on a kick of buying multiple tickets in a row from the same book and ended up with two $5,000 prizes (for a total of $10,000). They socked that money away and declared a moratorium on playing for a bit.
Then, on a recent day, she was struck by a feeling.
“One day on a whim, on my way home from work, I just decided to pick a store,” she said. The store: Crofton Liquors at 1641 Crain Highway in Crofton.
Initially she considered purchasing a different game, but that book of tickets didn’t have many tickets left. Instead, she went with the $5,000,000 Fortune game, and promptly stashed them away for later.
She went home, had dinner with her fiancé and then settled into the evening by telling him, “We’re about to win $5 million!” She broke out the tickets, scratched them and her intuition proved mostly accurate. One of the tickets proved to be a winner at the game’s second prize level of $100,000.
Far from being disappointed that her $5 million prediction did not come true, she said she and her fiancé were thrilled.
They have no particularly thrilling plans for the winnings, though. They were already planning a small wedding for later this year, and the extra money will come in handy for that. And the winner is the primary caregiver for her mom, which can result in unforeseen expenses. But most of the proceeds, she said, will be going into savings.
A celebratory seafood dinner, likely at a favorite spot in Annapolis, is also on the short-term agenda.
Asked if she would be playing the Lottery again in the future, she replied: “Oh, absolutely! When I feel it. I have to have a feeling.”
The $5,000,000 Fortune game has been available since February and none of its three top-tier $5 million prizes has been claimed to date. The $100,000 prize claimed by the Hanover player leaves seven of the original nine at that level unclaimed. In addition, there are eight of nine prizes at the third tier $50,000 level remaining, along with tens of thousands of other prizes ranging from $50 to $10,000.
